Nazareth venerates the annunciation twice, in two churches, on the strength of two different texts. The Latin Basilica of the Annunciation, completed in 1969, stands over Byzantine and Crusader predecessors and encloses a grotto understood as part of the house of Mary. Graffiti scratched by early pilgrims were found in the excavations beneath it, including a Greek invocation that has been read as a salutation of Mary and is among the oldest such inscriptions anywhere. The upper church is hung with images of the Virgin donated by Catholic communities from every continent, each in its own national idiom, which makes the building an inadvertent museum of how one figure is imagined differently around the world.
The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Gabriel stands over the town's spring. Its tradition follows the second century Protoevangelium of James, in which the angel first addresses Mary while she is drawing water and only afterwards speaks to her indoors. Pilgrims drink from the spring inside the church, and Mary's Well downhill is fed from the same source.
Modern Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel, with a Muslim majority and a substantial Christian minority of several denominations, and the two populations share a small and crowded old town. A dispute in the late 1990s over a proposed mosque on ground beside the basilica, at the tomb of a nephew of Saladin, drew international attention before the government removed the foundations in 2002. The Jewish town of Nof HaGalil, built on the ridge above from the 1950s, is administratively separate.